All Steven Johnson Quotes
- Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and… Ago
- Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore. Explore
- As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation. Continue
- If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative. Commercial
- When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive. Ideas
- Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when… Child
- I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings… Been
- I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or… Actual
- In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions… All
- It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime… Achievement
- Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it… Analysis
- Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on… Adaptive
- The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in… Barrel
- We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a… Amazing
- What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment… Better
- What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring… Ahead
- This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor… Age
- The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk;… Art
- This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s… Connected
- Chance favors the connected mind. Chance